Accountability is about who is legally or morally responsible for something. Authorship is about what caused something to happen. The challenge we have is that we often get the two mixed up. Sometimes, the people involved in incidents may even deliberately try to mix them up.
I learned the importance of the distinction, working as a forensic psychotherapist with violent criminals. Many of them had endured abusive upbringings that had contributed to them developing behavioural problems that had eventually spiralled into their crimes.
Read more: HR lessons from the Gregg Wallace case
I had to remain crystal clear with them that they were 100% accountable for their behaviour, while also acknowledging and helping them understand how their past experience was involved in authoring – or leading to – how they acted the way they did. I needed to do this so they understood how their past was still fuelling their behaviour, so they stood a chance of then stopping it.
This basic distinction between accountability and authorship is thus a kind of mental trick to help you separate the need for moral justice from the practical need to help you understand a behaviour. You can use it to help try and understand how to repeat something desirable. Or you can use it to try and prevent something from happening again. And it can be applied to anything from as mundane as training a pet to not chew your furniture to the most terrible acts of violence on the world stage.
The concern with the much of the coverage of the Gregg Wallace controversy so far, then, is that it has primarily involved finger-pointing: essentially, focusing on accountability with little interest in how such alleged events could become authored. There has been some talk of the broader factors involved, such as the culture of the organisation, but even there, the talk has been in a very accusatorial kind of way, assuming a lack of responsibility by bad actors.
Read more: Legal ease: Prevent toxic cultures by acting early
Yet, in the vast majority of toxic behaviour situations in the workplace, what tends to happen is not that bad people suddenly do bad things, but that behaviours and events gradually drift into being that way.
It is not hard to imagine a scenario in which an individual finds success and influence. They may be seen as a bit of a 'character', and this could be part of why they are successful. Yes, there may be an odd concern but things are going well and the majority of people seem to enjoy working with them. The individual themselves is encouraged by their success, and so do ever more of what they think is making them successful. The people around them don't want to disturb this success. Everyone wants the good times to continue.
It all sounds so innocuous and, indeed, so familiar. Because processes like these can sustain all sorts of toxic behaviours; not just the big-ticket grossly inappropriate ones, but also the quiet employee motivation-destroying ones. And they happen all the time.
This is why, in moments like this, it is so important that HR ensures both that individuals are held fully accountable for their behaviour and that the discussion does not fall into over-simplistic finger-pointing. Because every time this happens, an opportunity to prevent future toxic behaviour is missed.
Read more: Turning toxic cultures around
Understanding authorship isn't easy, and usually feels very uncomfortable. In fact, if it doesn’t, you’re probably not doing it right. After all, it can feel unfair to those on the periphery of events who may feel that they haven’t done anything wrong. And they may not have done. Not morally. But that doesn’t mean that their behaviour – like some butterfly effect – did not in some way contribute to events eventually occurring.
Understanding this is complex and difficult. Rules and guidelines are not sufficient. Ultimately, only openness, honesty and self-reflection bring the understanding to shift culture and behaviour.
Ensuring there is the proper learning in moments like is one of HR's most important jobs.
Nik Kinley is a director at leadership consultancy Talent Solutions
